In many industries, most systems have been designed as single systems that operate in a given manner, oftentimes independent of other systems with which the systems may function. However, with today's advances in technology, such a design approach is becoming more difficult to implement as systems are becoming more highly integrated with other systems. In this regard, whereas a development program may have previously only designed a single system, such a program may now be more likely to design a more complex single system, or a networked system-of-systems (SoS).
With the increase in the demand of programs to develop more complex systems and systems-of-systems, the size and complexity of the engineering tasks required to design such systems also naturally increases. And with the increase in the size and complexity of the engineering tasks required to design complex systems and systems-of-systems, program costs and risks also increase. Thus, whereas complex systems and systems-of-systems continue to be designed using conventional engineering techniques, such techniques generally do not provide the level of detail, discipline, process flow definition and architecture description required for the efficient and effective development of the architectures for future systems and systems-of-systems. Thus, it would be desirable to design a system, method and computer program product to design a system-of-systems architecture in a manner that provides a continuous and coherent architecture description and model from the system-of-systems level down to the base hardware and software component level.